This young Brooklyn artist devises complex systems for her paintings and sculptures, but the subtly beautiful results are not at all predictable.

Art Show: Julia Dault

Art Show: Julia Dault

Julia Dault's art threatens to explode with contained passion. Her sculptures—shiny acrylic sheets that have been bound and bundled—seem on the verge of coming uncoiled. For her vigorously patterned paintings, she masks bright industrial colors with quiet, regular strokes. ("There's something so satisfying about parallel lines," she says.) But titanic internal forces erupt through her powerful need for order, as she judiciously peels back the obscuring layer to reveal the glow underneath.

The 35-year-old, Toronto-born Dault squirms at the idea of psychological explanations of her work, but she acknowledges that her competing urges to expose and conceal might have something to do with her stint as an art critic for Canada's National Post. For a few years, she led a double life, making art in secret while publicly passing judgment on the artists she privately considered her peers. She describes herself as having been a "closeted artist" until she finally "came out" in 2006. She then moved to New York and got an MFA at Parsons. "I completely overhauled my life," she says. It seems to have worked out: In 2012, the Guggenheim bought one of her paintings.

Each of Dault's paintings is a palimpsest, coyly divulging its previous iterations. She typically covers a canvas with a lush layer of color or a swatch of bright fabric. Then she stretches a sheet of clear vinyl over that foundation and smears pigment on top. Finally, she performs a kind of archaeological striptease, strategically scraping away the topmost layer with a squeegee, a comb, or some other improvised implement. The tracks left by the tool give the viewer an instant grasp of both process and effect.